Iterative Weighted Non-smooth Non-negative Matrix Factorization for Face Recognition

Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF) is a part-based image representation method. It comes from the intuitive idea that entire face image can be constructed by combining several parts. In this paper, we propose a framework for face recognition by finding localized, part-based representations, denoted "Iterative weighted non-smooth non-negative matrix factorization" (IWNS-NMF). A new cost function is proposed in order to incorporate sparsity which is controlled by a specific parameter and weights of feature coefficients. This method extracts highly localized patterns, which generally improves the capability of face recognition. After extracting patterns by IWNS-NMF, we use principle component analysis to reduce dimension for classification by linear SVM. The Recognition rates on ORL, YALE and JAFFE datasets were 97.5, 93.33 and 87.8%, respectively. Comparisons to the related methods in the literature indicate that the proposed IWNS-NMF method achieves higher face recognition performance than NMF, NS-NMF, Local NMF and SNMF.